Fortnite is, technically speaking, Epic’s first free-to-play game. The crayola colored smash-and-shoot-and-loot-and-build-er is being designed primarily as a co-op thing, but with persistent MMO-style progression underlying it all. There’s also still-nascent PVP in the works, further necessitating balance in the name of fair fun. Fortnite is, however, a giant mixed bag of moving parts, multiple genres (action, building, crafting, a Gears-of-War-style horde mode, etc) mashed together. How do you make all of that free-to-play without mucking it up?

I asked producer Roger Collum about Epic’s plans, influences from games like League of Legends and Team Fortress 2, the potential emergence of a tedious grind with things like XP boosters in the mix, whether or not you can really equate time and money as free-to-play devs so often do, and more. It’s all below.

RPS: You’ve mentioned League of Legends a lot, especially in regard to your business model. How will that work, though? Fortnite seems pretty drastically different from a MOBA, at least so far. I mean, there are only a few classes, for one thing.

Collum: Looking to League of Legends as a model for good free-to-play is definitely not a bad thing. I mean, League has a huge audience, and we’re espousing that we’re not pay-to-win. League is definitely not pay-to-win. So there’s that.

Also, if you don’t have a large number of people playing for free, then the paying people won’t have anybody to play against, right? You need people to fill worlds. That adds value to the game.

We’ve looked at League as a model for possible PVP stuff. Don’t have anything nailed down, though.

RPS: OK, so break down for me what a free player will experience when they play Fortnite. What will they have access to? What will be blocked off, if anything?

Collum: The free experience we envision is one we feel like, if they invest the time, they’re getting the same experience as someone who’s spending money. Using League of Legends as an example, I know people who spend a ton of money on it, and I know people who don’t spend a cent. The people who don’t spend anything still have a great time. They can try out classes and still fully experience what a MOBA is.

That’s our goal for Fortnite – to have that kind of freedom and that level of communication with our community. I think if you nickel-and-dime people, they’re not gonna show up.

If we hit millions of users and only a fraction of those people pay, we’re still gonna be able to pay our bills. We’ll still feel successful. We’ll still feel good about it as a business model. What’s exciting to me is that Gears and Unreal Tournament are successful games, but nowhere near the numbers that Dota gets. If we could get an audience in the hundreds of millions worldwide playing Fortnite, that would tickle me pink. We don’t need them to spend money.

RPS: You talk about investing time versus investing money. But that distinction, I think, has led to some of the worst elements of F2P. Time gates, for instance – giant neon stop signs that basically say, “If you don’t pay, you can’t play anymore today.”

Collum: Oh yeah. As gamers ourselves, we’re irritated at a lot of the free-to-play practices that some games apply. Time gates, things of that nature. ‘You get X number of turns per day unless you spend money.’ That’s super lame. We don’t want to do anything like that.

Look at TF2, for example. Their primary source of income for that game is cosmetics. They don’t really provide power. We’re not interested in providing power. Maybe we’ll provide health or XP boosts, things that can accelerate time, but we’re not gonna make time a hindrance to players.

RPS: I’m definitely glad to hear that. That said, even XP boosts can be a problem sometimes. It’s tough to get level-up pacing just right so that it’s not a total grind for non-paying players. I mean, even otherwise really excellent games – for instance Tribes Ascend, off the top of my head – had trouble with that.

Collum: I’m an RPG player so I like the grind. Maybe I’m totally weird in that way. Like Dark Souls, you keep beating yourself against the wall because it’s fun. I don’t think we’re gonna get to that point, though.

People who don’t pay are gonna have to work. There’s gonna be some level of work, but it’ll be satisfactory. It’ll be like in an MMO where you’re busting your butt to get to the next level and then you’re like, ‘Hurrah! I did it!’ I think we’re gonna generate that experience.

RPS: You’ve also mentioned a booster-pack-style system – something with an element of randomness to it. What all will come in those?

Collum: Right now we envision primarily cosmetics. We haven’t really worked out all of our plans on what will work there. We’re gonna look at our audience and see what they think is valuable. We could say hats and backpacks and shoes and beards and glasses. That’s the initial plan, but I don’t know if that’s compelling. I think they will be, but we need to investigate.

We don’t want it to come down to balance between a paying player and a free player. We don’t want it to seem punitive if you don’t spend money. But we do want people to feel value for money. So it’s that weird dichotomy where we don’t want people to feel bad for not spending, but we do want people to feel value if they spend money.

The first free to play game that got me to spend money was Vindictus, the Nexon MMO. The reason I spent money is because I didn’t have a lot of time to play. The people I was playing with had a ton of time. They way I could still contribute to that group was by spending. So I could buy XP boosts and defense shields and whatever – things that socially helped the rest of the group. I ended up being the guy with the money that helped improve the experience, and I got to feel socially good about doing that. I felt earnestly like, ‘Wow, this is awesome.’

I’m hoping we can engender some of that where people feel good about contributing to their team by spending a little money. Benefit the whole team while people who are investing time as a currency are contributing to the team in that way, by building the awesome base or grinding out crafting ingredients or whatever.

RPS: Once again, though, it goes back to that weird equivalence between time and money. In this case I think spending money only makes you a financier. Playing, being a part of the moment-to-moment struggles and triumphs, that makes you a friend. I’m sure there’s a happy midpoint between those two sides, but equating them strikes me as… odd.

Collum: I see what you’re saying. But you know, I have friends who don’t have jobs, and they spend a lot of time playing games. When I play, I’m behind. I can’t compete with people in that position. To keep up I have to either not get a lot of sleep or find other creative ways to contribute. I don’t disagree where there are scenarios where [people being financiers] happens, but I don’t think it’s universal.

I think there’s gonna be a balance. We have to find a balance. When Epic decided to go F2P with this project, there were plenty of skepticism in the building, plenty of people who were like, ‘I don’t want to do F2P. I think it’s cheap.’ But the company has grown into a mode of figuring out how to do this such that it’s not sleazy or slimy. Everyone benefits. There’s gonna be skepticism about whether or not we can pull it off, but I think we can.

RPS: It sounds like there’s been a lot of change at Epic in general. I mean, most visibly you lost both Cliff Bleszinski and [former executive producer] Rod Fergusson. Fortnite’s changed a lot in the past couple years too, and you’ve suddenly gone from nearly all-console to nearly all-PC games-wise. What’s going on?

Collum: Epic has changed hugely. I think it’s been positive. The people who were here at the start of Fortnite are still close friends, and they’ve left an indeliable mark on this company. But what it has allowed us to do is take other young, hungry, smart individuals in the team and let them step up and shine, take us in new directions.

The injection of fresh blood has helped a lot. Fortnite is vastly different than it was when we announced it years ago. The fundamental stuff was there when we announced, but the depth wasn’t there yet. It took some shifting of the guard and some internal realization that what we were doing wasn’t enough.

Initially we thought we were gonna be done in four months. We thought we were just gonna be like, ‘Boom, let’s do something really fast. It’s gonna be monsters and building and crafting and you’re gonna be able to grow crops.’ But then it morphed. We realized there was more to it, more than four months could do justice to.

RPS: What does the Fortnite team look like now? How many people did it lose? How many did it gain? Which aspects of the game did that affect?

Collum: The main creative team is mostly static. They’ve been here for a while, even on other projects. Obviously Cliff Bleszinski had a big influence when he was here. He’s not here anymore, but we’ve taken some of his ideas and expanded on them. The shift in team is not massive. It’s a handful of people, five or six. Our team has been pretty static in terms of size.

We started out wanting to be ultra-realistic dark Gears kind of gritty, sort of zombie apocalypse-like. And I mean, I love The Last of Us. Those sorts of things still appeal to us. But for Fortnite that changed organically in the team. We realized we could do more if we simplified the art style.

As it is, it’s so stylized and simple that we can just make more art more quickly. Then we realized if we did it right, we’d have a game that would still look nice for ages. You look at TF2 and it can still stand on its own two feet. Meanwhile if you look at Gears 1 compared to Gears 3, it’s practically night and day.

That’s where our heads were at, at the time. Plus, we wanted to do something very different from our previous games.

I don’t understand the argument anyway. A game where people who pay get access to better equipment sooner than those who don’t is pretty much the definition of pay-to-win. The question then simply becomes *how* pay-to-win it is(i.e. does it take 20 hours of gameplay for a free player to get the best gear, or 5000 hours? Also, how much better is the best gear than the worst?)

The only time a developer can honestly claim that their game is not pay-to-win whatsoever is when the things you can spend money on have absolutely no impact on gameplay. Even TF2 is a *little* pay-to-win and Valve never claimed otherwise. DOTA 2, on the other hand, is not pay-to-win.

Edit: Obviously, LoL is also a bit pay-to-win as paying players get more options. Also, it would only be possible for LoL to not be pay-to-win if every hero was exactly as balanced as every other hero in the hands of *any* player. Since that is a mathematical impossibility, the game is at least a tiny bit pay-to-win. If epic wants to use LoL as a model for a light pay-to-win game, that’s fine, but claiming that it isn’t pay-to-win even in the slightest shows that Epic doesn’t understand the term, and that’s worrying.

Uh, no. Paying to get things faster is not pay-to-win. That phrase describes a game that allows a paying user a distinct advantage in gameplay that a free user is prohibited from. The term is “Pay-to-win“, not “pay-to-progress-a-little-faster”.

It all depends, as the poster mentionnend, how much quicker youa re to get teh advantage, and how likely is a person playing casually to get that advantage during gameplay by normal playing. If it is something reachable within a few hours, then it is not pay to win. But if it is something which need longs hour of grinding, and most casual player will not reach it, then yes it can be named pay to win.

I would disagree with you on this. If the time taken to get the best gear is a retarded, unachievable level, then yes it’s pay to win. however, anything that just speeds it up I would call pay t advance. If you’ve ever seen totalbiscuit’s stuff on free to play, he often makes the point that many people don’t have the time to sink a thousand hours into a game to hit max level, but they do have money. this just means they can have fun. the real pay-to-win stuff is where you can buy items that are just better than the regular items, and are unavailable to free users. That’s when it starts being a serious issue, like with many iOS games.

If the game has matchmaking and you only meet people of similar power levels (be it because of gear or other parameters), then even if the best gear takes years to unlock if you don’t pay, the game cannot be called pay to win. I could be called frustrating though.

Games like World of Tanks propose a huge tech tree to unlock, and even if you pay for a premium account you’re unlikely to unlock all of the top tanks unless you do nothing of your day except play World of Tanks. Gear being hard to access doesn’t make it pay to win.

Unless by some twist on words you insist that “winning” is actually unlocking everything… which doesn’t make sense, in a perpetually evolving online game. In PvP games winning means pwning the other players, and if the matches remain fair I don’t know why people insist on applying the wrong labels.

I would imagine it’s not that difficult to make a game non-Pay-to-Win. Like, say what you want about Dota 2, it’s got one of the best systems out there – The gameplay part of the game is completely separate from the paid part of the game – Cosmetics for heroes, couriers, wards, HUDs, announcers, and all that rake them in crazy money.

So if you don’t want your game to be pay to win, it’s simple : Just make sure that absolutely nothing you sell will impact the game in terms of gameplay.

Yeah – one of the nice things about Dark Souls is the way in which ‘grinding’ is unnecessary and discouraged by the game’s systems – with player skill being more important than ‘level’ or gear (admittedly gear is something that has got progressively less important as the series has gone on).

I think it’s two different sentence.
“I like to grind which is strange” and “as strange as hitting your head on the wall until you break it”

And I had to grind a bit for better gears at the end of Dark Souls. As much as your skill is important, if you don’t have an armor/weapon good enough, you will have a huge problem. (at least if you don’t exploit bug which is a no no for me. I fought Glenn fair and square… Know it’s a bit masochist but well. Was proud at the end)

Well. If you want to experiment the different weapons created by boss souls, you don’t have that many possibility.

Saying that you need to grind to progress in a Souls is a heresy, I agree.
Saying that it doesn’t exist when you look at the cost of the weapons or when you know there is only one Titanite demon who respawn to give you Titanite shard…

It just that you choose how you run. Both exist and are recommended by mechanics of spawn.

And for parring, I tried twice and almost kill him “too” easily. I stopped using this as I wanted to give him a good last fight for what he have endured (and he had it as I was blocked a while). That’s what is nice with Souls, everyone try it in a different way.

(About the bug, it was using the two stalagmite on the left to block him)

I thought it interesting that he mentioned LoL’s F2P model because it’s pretty bad, and they most definitely sell power. Only for a few weeks until they nerf that new champ back to normal after they’ve made their money that is.

LOL. Valve DOESN T NEED to make money from their games, they have Steam for that….. So thinking about their games business model for ANY other company is ridiculous, because the goal with their games is not to make money, because THEY DON T NEED THE MONEY.

When you make millions of money with something, you can dick around during your free time. Well games to Valve can be this now. And I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but just that people need to put things into perspective….

Sadly, the “either you spend time or you spend money” is pretty much the definition of free-to-grind. Well, unless the game is really generous with crafting resources, Loadout-style, which I doubt will be the case here. And to think I had such hopes for this game…

Also, it’s real nice that people keep bringing up TF2 as an example of good free-to-play design, when the need to constantly add new items to sell has diluted gameplay and art style by a thousand percent compared to the original design, and Mann Co. crates are basically thinly-disguised gambling.

I like that, free to grind. Its a nice concept. Warframe has it, and is a great game. You can get the nice toys *now* or you can work weeks long to get them by doing hundreds of missions, either way, its fun, and either way, you will be grinding. Skill can cut trough the grinding, anyway, on Warframe high level waves give better rewards, the character is soo flexible, fast, … that player skill account for a lot. Warframe is a amazing game, hope perfect world don’t murder it.

Hopefully Perfect World will fix the Strict NAT network problems that caused me to stop playing the game. The devs certainly didn’t seem interested in fixing it before. Though maybe that has already changed in more recent months.

(Short version: Warframe’s network code is/was incompatible with a number of routers and ISPs. This was not an issue that the player could solve short of buying a different brand of router and/or switching to another ISP. Affected players could only play with a fraction of the actual userbase. The devs ignored complaints for months before finally acknowledging the issue, at which point they seemed to just start ignoring it again.)

Yeah, Warframe rocks! Enjoyed it enough that I actually spent some money on it to support them. I decided early on though not to buy any equipment, just slots for the equipment that I got in game. Hope Perfect World doesn’t screw it up. Maybe they just want to get the engine to use elsewhere, and will let the game develop at its own pace.

As somebody who has been playing TF2 ever since I preordered The Orange Box, I really don’t mind the way it’s progressed.

The art is a bit messier, but then I never felt TF2’s style disallowed a lot of the crazy things you see in it now. TF2 had to be completely redone when Valve decided they wanted to make a “gamey” game that allows ridiculousness, given that its original military trappings weren’t conducive to things like rocket jumping and the like. I think the 60’s Spy theme fit nicely with the gameplay Valve produced, but it wasn’t a law or anything. And I haven’t had any readability issues: A Heavy with a minigun is still a Heavy with a minigun, regardless of what he has on his head.

Some people seem to have a case of whiplash when they log into TF2 after a break, but it’s not an experience I can share in. To me it’s still the same game it was when it was released, but with more bells on. Granted, the maps and modes I regularly play are fairly narrow. Maybe I’m missing the big picture.

I think the only issue I have with its current model is the crates. That is pretty much gambling and I don’t like to see that practice encouraged. At the same time, I’ve had no trouble ignoring every single one I’ve received. I trade ‘em for metal and craft some hats. Yay.

Nathan! Glad to see you call them out on some of the f2p practices that create games which are inherently unfun and vampiric of the audience. Sure they PR-speak side-stepped around you a bit, but even asking that stuff and giving pushback is a good thing.

I think everyone pretty much realizes what a silly, sneaky sort of gimmick “f2p” is by now. I guess for some developers just making compelling computer game software that people will simply want to *buy* up front is too difficult a chore. And so they have to try and lure people to actually come in and buy. I’ve got a better idea.

I’m old school, and for years f2p was the norm in the industry: you got an actual *demo* of a game upfront for free. You took a look at the demo and if you liked what you saw and wanted more you bought the game. Simple. Much better, imo.

Oh, I remember the times when I scoured the demos on the PC Gamer CD. Good times. I worn those CDs out, and they left me with the hunger to play those games, so yeah, it kinda worked.

Call me old-fashioned, but I really miss when having a demo for a game was the standard, not the exception.
There are succesful models of F2P games that come to mind, like DOTA2, but there’s still something underhanded and stinky in that kind of payment model. Blocking content from a game, unless you pay, “blemishes” the experience for me.
With time I’m getting more and more used to this feeling, even though I still don’t like it.

Please, developers, give us demos, they were the cool stuff. It’s not even a matter of dedicating many resources to creating one, as you can just cut a little portion of the game, and let us hungry gamers taste and savour it, and see how do we like it.

No they can’t. You obviously have never coded in your life or had anything to do with building software.
Building demos even for non-game software requires extensive effort, money and time because it is a new project in itself that has to be flawless in order to represent your actual product. You can’t just take a chunk of the game and throw it out there. You have to copy/paste select parts of the code, debug that code and get it running in a new project, add extra coding for UI/Restrictions/bug fixes/code to handle unexpected results, and you have to test the ever loving crap out of it to make sure it is polished for the user, all of which is expensive when you consider every employee working on this has a salary of 70K average. That’s a lot of money. Also, if the demo isn’t flawless, the game loses sales before it is even out the door. That doesn’t even cover some games where it isn’t possible to build a demo that properly shows off the game and its mechanics or what it even really is capable of (any epic rpg ever). It has been proven that demos actually harm the sale of games because the demo either breaks due to over 100,000+ different variable causes and people assume the game is a buggy piece of crap or the demo sucks/doesn’t actually represent the game well in that small slice.

@Corb: Thanks for the explanation.
True, I don’t have any coding or game-building experience, mine was just a wish. It’s a real pity then, that so many resources have to be invested just to take those selected chunks of code, make ‘em work, and test the heck out of them.
Well, we can at least try-before-you-buy in other ways.

The “can’t play with friends who play more than you” problem goes away if you don’t keep making games where time = power. I can play chess with my friends who play more than I do and still do okay, in part because they don’t get to replace their pawns with queens after playing long enough.

XP needs to stay the heck out of online games. I’m not going to play your game 10 hours a week every week for over a year, s***heads. Try making your game fun instead of relying on addictive features in your monetization layer.

I hope it turns out Epic doesn’t have what it takes to run an MMO, and this gets sold of to Zynga or Nexon so they can get back to focusing on the Unreal Engine.

Epic definitely shouldn’t just focus on the engine. They need to have a game to act as a test bed for the engine, so that they can work through issues internally before they become problems to third-party licensees.

I have heard at least one other developer (can’t remember which one right now, I’m afraid) who won’t start using the new Unreal Engine until a game ships that uses it. Nobody wants to be the one who gets their development derailed because they had to deal with the version 1.0 bugs.

League of Legend’s F2P pricing model is not a model you want to be looking at. Similarly to their client, similarly to certain directions they took their game balance in, some of these things are too difficult to go back and change.

Dota 2 however is a pricing model you should look at. The real meat of the game is in the gameplay, cosmetics are optional, but you have to be so confident in your gameplay that you know people will play and buy items even though they have the whole game and lose nothing by playing and not paying a cent.

If you want to pedal ‘power’ pricing, follow TF2’s pricing model. Have a crafting system so items are available for everyone if you work for it, for every benefit an item provides provide a suitable drawback. Even though some items may inevitably be ‘better’ than others, there should be enough balance to make it have harsh enough penalties.

I do not understand the business decision behind F2P. Why is this more desirable than a game you pay upfront? It can’t be that the design or development can be lazier/cheaper, if the game sucks, no one is going to buy anyway.

Instead you are planting the seed of suspicion into the gamer making him wonder all the time why they’d have to buy this or that feature, how much time they will safe and when they will have to pay for more. It’s the business model of a drug dealer.

I play games for entertainment and to escape reality, and F2P brings me constantly back to the money issue and makes me wonder how much more I will have to spend to see the end of the game and how far they will go to get my money. If I buy a game, it is mine, the purchase is made, the money gone, I will never think of it again. Sell your game, if you want me to pay more money, offer hats or add paid DLC. If I feel like it, I can buy it, but at least I know what I am getting.

I liked it better when I could play demos of games and decide if I wanted to pay for the full experience.
This guy doesn’t really seem to know what they’re doing with this game, he’s just saying that F2P “could” be great. With the exception of TF2 and DOTA2, I’ve yet to play an F2P game that had a payment system that didn’t annoy me.

Hmm, this game looks like it’s going to end up like Monday Night Combat and Super MNC. Pity, those games actually were rather good, but no one plays them.

I think for this to take off, it’s basically going to have to figure out how to do it without steam. Reason for that is that on steam, there are two rather large free games competing for players, TF2 and DotA2, so while they are there, there’s always going to be trouble, since valve’s priviliged position within steam is always going to have a detrimental effect on any third party games.

So many alarm bells started ringing in my head as I read this article. It’s like, he name checks League of Legends, and seems to understand that somehow they are a successful free to play game, but then he goes on to talk about how they want to be like League of Legends or whatever and it’s clear he doesn’t have a fuckin’ CLUE about why League of Legends is successful F2P game.

Fortnight is not going to get it right. I’ve already read articles where they detail weapon/structure schematics and how you can either buy them or ‘find them in the world’, but I guarantee you the drop rate or award rate for them will be so ridiculously onerous that no one will want to put the time in. Somehow League of Legends manages to subsist almost entirely on cosmetic sales, and yet no one can figure out that if you make your game fun and people want to play it, they’ll happily buy new skins for characters they like so that they don’t look just like everyone else.

There’s only one shooter which got F2P right. That shooter is NOT TF2. It’s Loadout. So whenever someone says they are gonna make a F2P shooter and they don’t say “We’ll look at Loadout as an example”, this to me means the shooter will be compromised by F2P. Literally every other shooter has been.